Kirk Watson emerges from cave after 200 years of isolation

Former Austin mayor and Texas state senator Kirk Watson, after the Texas legislature voted to require physicians performing abortions to use “due diligence” in determining the age of abortion patients, said:

“I can’t think of another instance where we presume women are children,” Watson said. “I certainly can’t think of any situation where we presume a man is a child.”

Senator Kirk Watson either never drinks, or has employees to get him his alcohol. I’m over fifty years old, and I still get carded when the bartender is paranoid enough. More and more of them are today, and more and more the law requires them to be. In most states, “they looked older than 21” is not a defense if a vendor sells liquor to someone under 21. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission requires checking identification “of anyone who reasonably appears 26 years old or younger”. In Indiana, liquor sellers are specifically required to check identification of anyone “who is or reasonably appears to be less than forty (40) years of age.”

Given how difficult it is for young cashiers to tell the age of people over thirty, this means that anyone who doesn’t look sixty is going to get carded.

All of which of course ignores the fact that people age 18 to 21 are also adults, and are assumed children for the purposes of alcohol purchases; male or female, they aren’t even allowed to buy it, identification or not.

Watson also hasn’t been paying attention to what’s going on in college campuses today. When two people get drunk, and only the man is held responsible for the consequences, we are presuming that the woman is a child. Trigger warnings have rapidly become an assumption that both women and men are unable to face the world of adult ideas.

More and more on social media, we are presuming that women are children who cannot handle any political discussion without severe distress; and we are presuming that the adults—men—should treat them like children rather than adults.

But there’s a bigger point in what Watson said. It’s true, as far as I know, that we don’t require a presumption of childhood for most other procedures for which a child is required to have parental consent. That’s because a whole lot of the law still assumes common sense.

I don’t see where Texas law requires tattoo artists to check people’s ID when they get an obscene or offensive tattoo, for instance, even though parental consent is required by law. For the most part, we just assume that tattoo artists will display common sense. Unlike judges and abortion doctors, they won’t try to get around the law for political reasons.

We don’t require body piercers to assume their customers are under 18, either. We assume common sense. We don’t require body piercers to do a breath test to make sure their customers are sober. We literally assume common sense.

A person may not perform body piercing if the person suspects that the individual on whom the body piercing is to be performed is under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

We can do that, because tattoo artists and piercers show more common sense than abortion doctors and judges do when it comes to abortion.

Plastic surgery also requires parental consent for those under 18, and while the requirement is listed everywhere on plastic surgery sites, I cannot find the controlling law. It relies so much on common sense that there’s no need to describe the law itself, if there even is one. It’s just common sense that surgery on minors requires parental consent. The standard among physicians is that parental consent is required for a minor to have informed consent for any surgery, but while there may be and likely is a law to this effect somewhere, I cannot find it. Everyone just relies on common sense.

Abortion is an exception in the laws and standards governing medical procedures. Normally, medical providers require parental consent for non-emergency treatment, but abortion is treated as an exception from this rule by abortion providers. And whenever legislators try to bring abortion back into the medical standard for parental consent, abortion doctors and the left try to skirt the law. If Kirk Watson had supported parental consent laws, his complaint that we shouldn’t have to require IDs might be more believable. But his real complaint appears to be that we are treating children as children, not that we are treating adults as children.

As it is, his argument that we don’t require identification elsewhere among adults is silly on its face. What we don’t require is common sense.

feminism

“Feminists claim to represent and promote the interests of women, but if you scratch the surface, you’ll find that feminism embraces a streak of misogyny to make the ancient patriarchs green with envy.”

“Women once were encouraged to be strong and independent, to brush aside insensitive words and actions and to emerge stronger. But now, politicians, pundits, even celebrities are feeding an outrage machine by telling women they should be offended by anything and everything.”

“In 1979, Bellotti v Baird held a Massachusetts statute governing parental or judicial consent for minors seeking abortion unconstitutional. The case ruled that a minor could obtain an abortion without the consent of her parents. However, a state can require a court to authorize the minor's decision either by determining she is mature enough to make the decision on her own or by determining that despite her immaturity, the decision to abort is in her best interest.”

“Laws that affect the minor's right to consent to medical care have been developed under the precedent of parental autonomy. In adolescents under the age of majority who receive health care services, the American Academy of Pediatrics has a long-standing policy statement encouraging physicians and parents to include adolescents in the decision-making process, but the parental autonomy and parental right to give consent for a minor is the standard.”

“After four hours of debate and more than a dozen failed amendments offered by Democrats, the Senate on Monday gave preliminary approval to far-reaching restrictions on minors seeking abortions in Texas without parental consent.” (Memeorandum thread)

“Yet she may be a victim of a system that, in the worthy goal of trying to protect women, also infantilizes them. There's a presumption, argued KGO talk show host, attorney and feminist Christine Craft, that a woman ‘can't possibly know what's best for her. She's making it up.’ The system now treats women ‘like they're 6-year-old girls’ who ‘have to be told what it is they think,’ Craft said.”

“Some people say that California’s ‘affirmative consent’ law goes too far. But what else archaic misogynists don’t realize is that adult women are just not strong enough to articulate what they want in sexual situations.”

trigger warnings

“The confusion is telling, though. It shows that while keeping college-level discussions ‘safe’ may feel good to the hypersensitive, it’s bad for them and for everyone else. People ought to go to college to sharpen their wits and broaden their field of vision. Shield them from unfamiliar ideas, and they’ll never learn the discipline of seeing the world as other people see it.” (Memeorandum thread)

Evil doesn’t win by being evil. It wins by convincing us that it is virtuous. Pregnant women know, instinctively, that they are carrying a child. But we have allowed ourselves to be convinced as a society that they are wrong.

San Diego pro-abortion activists such as Canvas for a Cause and San Diego’s Radical Feminists of Occupy San Diego are protesting a San Diego Catholic organization that, in their words, “exists to prevent women from getting abortions”.